their public lives to promote consumption, but their ability to do so is determined by the creation of an aspirational, interesting and enviable lifestyle through the products that they consume. So their status is largely based on the careful curation of their own consumption. For an influencer, whose stock-in-trade is living a life that others want, a media feed without Coachella is an incomplete and below average product, like a car without air conditioning. The idea that people are worth following because of the interesting ways they create an identity through consumption demonstrates the increasingly strong connection between who a person is and what they consume.
Influencers also demonstrate how new technologies and platforms are designed for commercial purposes. Instagram was originally touted as a venue for people to share pictures with friends, but it quickly transformed into a marketing tool – both for the collection and sale of data about our consumer preferences to advertisers and as a more traditional advertising venue – in order to maximize its revenue stream.
Do influencers represent a worrying new trend in which people famous for doing nothing other than showing off their lives peddle a shallow, materialistic and yet unattainable version of the “good life” to their impressionable followers? Should the idea that someone’s life can become a marketable, commercial product give us cause for concern?
What Are We Talking About? Consumption and Political Economy
As its title suggests, this book is about consumption. What the title does not make clear is what we actually mean by that word. Consumption did not always mean what it does now. Back in the day, it meant the “using up” of things, like physical strength, which meant that it was used to describe the exhaustion of the body caused by tuberculosis (Trentmann, 2016). From this definition, it is clear that consumption had something of a negative connotation, associated with wastefulness and tragic wasting away.
The word “consumption” has benefited from a remarkable transformation to become associated with the pleasures of enjoying goods and services such as those offered by Coachella. Different scholars have put forward very different definitions, from the relatively narrow to the very broad. On the very broad end of the spectrum, in the discipline of economics, consumption generally means the use of goods and services by households (McCabe, 2015: 4–5). Historian Frank Trentmann defines consumption as “a shorthand that refers to a whole bundle of goods that are obtained via different systems of provision and used for different purposes” (Trentmann, 2012: 3). This broad definition allows him to place very different goods and services, acquired and used in a wide variety of ways, under the category of consumption. To use his examples, buying a Ferrari and turning on a shower are both consumption activities. For Trentmann, the key difference between the two is that one is a luxury, purchased to display your status in society, and the other is more of a necessity and done without any showy considerations. We might also add that the Ferrari is produced by a for-profit company, while the water that streams out of the shower is, for most people, provided by a utility, owned, controlled or heavily regulated by the government. Clearly, Trentmann’s definition can be applied across almost all societies, political economic systems and historical periods. This definition could be used to describe someone in the United States in 2019, buying (or stealing) a digital download, and someone two thousand years ago, eating a root vegetable pulled out of the ground for the communal pot in a hunter-gatherer society.
Those opting for a narrower definition often attempt to distinguish between consumption done in different manners with different motives. Historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb define consumption in a consumer society as taking place in the context of the market, and in which people have sufficient discretionary income to buy for fashion and novelty rather than necessity and durability (McKendrick et al., 1982: 3). An extension of a consumer society’s attraction to fashion and novelty added by some scholars is that “wants and needs [are] infinitely stretchable” (Stearns, 2001: 16), so that people are willing to “take up everything that is endlessly produced” (Clarke et al., 2003: 27). This creates a distinction between the motives of people in a pre-consumer society – those who are satisfied with some (admittedly unspecified) level of comforts from consumption – and those in a consumer society – who behave in a manner which reflects what economists define as non-satiation of wants.
Writers taking the role of consumption in defining people’s goals and identities one step further often talk about consumerism, or a consumer society, as one in which “many people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display” (Stearns, 2001: ix). The addition in this definition is the “formulation of goals in life,” so consumption in the context of consumerism is not only about acquiring but also about identifying yourself through what has been acquired. Sociologist Mark Paterson, for example, has a definition of consumerism that appears to be targeted toward the importance of lifestyle considerations: “a particular moment in which the consumer is participating in a series of processes, having taken account of branding, images, notions of self-worth … and exercised the temporary satisfaction of a desire or felt need” (Paterson, 2017: 3). For Paterson, any examination of current consumption must include “what kinds of things are motivating our decisions to buy, such as the concept of lifestyle, advertising, and notions of consumer choice” (ibid.: 12). This suggests that people define themselves by their consumption – as consumers – rather than through the other roles in their lives. Instead of identifying with their occupation, for example, people view work only as a means “to acquire coveted, meaning-laden consumer items, while the inherent meanings or value attributed to one’s work, career, or job largely [loses] importance … the primary purpose of work [is] its potential or ability to generate disposable income for consumption” (Dholakia and Fuat Firat, 1998: 5). This creates a difference between Trentmann-style consumption, which can be applied fairly universally, a consumer society and consumerism. We use the word “consumerism” to refer to a cultural orientation in which needs are fulfilled and meaning is produced primarily through the acquisition of commodities.
This book gives an analysis of consumption using a political economy framework. This means that it will examine theories through which we can analyze the context for, and consequences of, most consumption as it is currently practiced within a specific system of political economy. Consumption is part of an economic system. Rather than approaching it from the exclusive point of view of the individual consumer, a political economy of consumption centers the systemic: the needs of a capitalist system for growth, the embeddedness of individual consumption in commodity-specific “systems of provisioning” (Fine, 2002: 79), and the problems that arise from those systems for people and the planet. Political economy also foregrounds that consumerism as a mass phenomenon is historically specific. The implication of this is that a political economy of consumption does not set out to generate a critique of “consumption” as a transhistorical or ahistorical category. We must, in some way, shape or form, consume. Rather, we set out to add to our understanding of how capitalism conditions our patterns of consumption in specific ways.
We will take McKendrick et al.’s definition of consumption, which includes the market, one step further by arguing that capitalism – our currently dominant political economic system – contains two other crucial components: for-profit, private ownership and wage labour. Many other political economies, such as slavery, used markets extensively. The key difference between capitalism and slavery is not markets but the different rules about how labour is organized, which have crucial implications for the manner in which consumption should be analyzed. Slaves engaged in consumption – they ate food, wore clothes and slept in shelter of better or often worse quality. They even had some input into the goods and services purchased for their use (McDonald, 2012: 118). However, consumption by the slave, as an owned input into production, would have been determined largely by the slave owner, with the purpose of yielding the highest return in terms of minimizing the cost while maintaining the value of the slave as a salable asset and input in production. In capitalism, for-profit firms hire workers in the labour market based on whether the costs of the worker are less than the benefits that the worker produces for the firm. This calculation
